Thyssenkrupp's supervisory board concluded a planned merger of the company's steelmaking business with India's Tata to create the second-largest steelmaker in Europe. The two firms will each have a 50% share in the new company called Thyssenkrupp Tata Steel, which will be headquartered in the Netherlands, and employ 48,000 people at 34 sites worldwide. The decision follows two years of negotiations and initially met strong resistance from trade union IG Metall after Thyssenkrupp announced that it would cut around 2,000 jobs as part of the deal. The union reversed its position after the company gave workplace assurances and guaranteed it would not close down German plants. That agreement was accepted with an overwhelming majority of the workforce.
Read on: in English … Read on: in German …
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers or Sanne van der Gaag, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the Head of communications at the ETUI, Willy De Backer wdebacker@etui.org © ETUI